The Best Marketing Ideas of the Week

Instead of utilizing a website, you need to utilize a web presence, which consists of carefully planned placements of content about your business on other highly-trafficked websites. Here’s the formula for a healthy web presence:

Search Engine Presence.
Optimize your website content for search engines, and place paid-search advertisements on Google and Bing. Create local listings for any physical stores or offices on all local directories. Include your products in shopping search feeds such as Google Product Search.

Content website presence.
Use an advertising network to place display ads on websites that produce content about furniture, home décor, high-end real estate, and other topics of interest to your target market. Place links to your website on other websites and blogs where possible.

Social media presence.
Create business pages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and niche social communities in non-competing industries. If you have physical stores, create listings on local directories and review sites such as local.com, Yelp.com, Foursquare.com, and furniture review sites. Post your emails, coupons, and other communications to social media sites and create a blog for search engines and humans to read and link back to your site.

Rich media presence.
Don’t limit pictures and videos to your own website. Also post them to media sites such as YouTube, Picasa, and Flickr and ask people to share them with friends and colleagues.

Inbox presence.
Make sure your advertisements and website pages allow people to subscribe to your emails, text messages, blog posts, and social media feeds so your messages can occupy inboxes, social media walls and other kinds of communication placeholders.